Defensive Posturing
by paganpunk2
Summary: Fox writes a secret letter expressing his frustration with the world's treatment of his lover.


The very first thing I noticed about him was his eyes. Not the way they were set into his face, balanced as carefully and perfectly as the rest of his body, not the bright red feathers framing them that seemed to be what drew everyone else's gaze, not the defiant glare that they sent piercingly into anyone who dared challenge him with a glance; none of those things were what initially caught my attention. On that day, a short three weeks after my own most personal tragedy had struck home, it was the pain laying behind the brilliant sapphire orbs that required my attention, pulling me to him like a butterfly to a candle.

Like the butterfly, I quickly discovered that what I had been attracted to burned far hotter and brighter than I had ever dreamed possible. Compared to his, my agony of separation was but a fleeting sensation, a little pinch from reality to remind me that even the greatest of men are mortal. I had lost my father, the dearest person in the world to me, and with him had fled so much-too much-of my innocence. But I was still luckier than Falco, who had never been given a chance to wrap himself in the sweet bliss made possible only by childhood ignorance of things such as death.

It took him years to tell me the story of his own growing up, and even after all the things he's shared with me, all the shudder-inducing tales that make me slink into his room some nights simply out of a need to touch him, to make sure that he really got out of that hell of a slum and is here with me, I know there is more that he remembers, things that he refuses to inflict upon me. 'You have enough nightmares of your own,' he always says when I've caught him staring melancholically out at the stars and press for an explanation. 'You don't need to carry any more of mine on top of it.' I want to, though. I want to because I've told him everything, everything that hurts me, everything that smolders deep inside, and I know that his shouldering part of my burden is what has kept me from going insane. I want to know the full weight of his emotional baggage not out of morbid curiosity, but only because I love him and don't want to imagine that he might someday succumb to the same depression that once had me contemplating methods of suicide.

Each person has their own ways of coping with things, with loss, with betrayal, with whatever happens to step into their path along the way. Falco has become my coping method, and he's never failed me. He never will. Most of the time I need only think of him, of what he would do or say in a situation, or catch a momentary flash of him passing in the hall, or hear a syllable spoken in his voice, and I am steady once more. When I need more than that, when the memories and the fantasies that come with them cannot be subdued by merely invoking his name and the strength it symbolizes in my mind, he knows somehow, and he appears as if by magic, no matter where he was or what he was doing the moment my black mood struck. After a mere second of analysis, he can tell what to do, whether he should push my buttons until I strike out at him or simply pull me into a safely abandoned spot where I can curl up in his arms and let him run his hand down my spine until the tension releases.

Without him, I would have cracked long ago.

I suppose that's why I'm writing all this; because I know the man he really is, underneath the tough veneer the rest of the world seems to think represents the whole of his person. Just because I'm a mercenary doesn't mean I'm an idiot-I read the papers, and I know what they say about him. I hear the public's opinion of him, the adjectives they attach to his name, and it's so hard to keep myself from correcting them. I can't say anything, though, because to the outside world he can be nothing more than my friend. If there was ever so much as a suspicion of something more than that between us, we would both be ruined, outcasts in a society where homosexuality is considered barely above incest on the list of crimes of the flesh. To defend him publicly against the ghastly things people say would be too risky, although it is a risk I would gladly take. My only hope is that someday, when we are both either dead or too damn old to care, this note will be found, and read, and the universe will realize what a mistake they've made in their censure of him.

He always tells me not to worry about it. 'It adds to my street cred,' he jokes, applying the stilted slum accent I taught him to hide long ago and pulling a horribly cheesy grin. Moments like that, when he makes fun of himself in an attempt to earn a smile from me, leave me wanting to boost his surprisingly low confidence. That's one thing I've never understood; how can people think that he's arrogant and egotistical? Sure, he brags a bit, and sometimes he rags on the guys who are still trying to pick up the finesse he's had since the first time he sat down in a flight simulator, but it's a farce. He knows he's a fantastic pilot-mostly because I won't let him forget the fact-but he carries a massive inferiority complex below the surface. 'I think I brag because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to act like a somewhat-normal person,' he confided to me once as we lay in bed. 'By all rights, I should either be dead or a drug dealer. I don't deserve what I've got, especially not the flying skills. I guess bragging is just my way of dealing with the guilt that comes along with that, the guilt of having gotten out of hell when so many others didn't.'

I hate it when he drags himself down like that. The night he said that, just like on all the other nights when he's tried to deflate what little true self-esteem he has, all I could do was tell him he shouldn't feel guilty, that he had earned everything he had, and then push my head against his shoulder until he got annoyed and kissed me to make me stop. When he makes derogatory comments about himself in public, of course, I can't do anything more than cast a look in his direction begging him to stop, my whole body aching with the need to reassure him of his worth. Sometimes he sees my distress, and when he sees that he's hurting me he'll stop, but every word to that point is like a knife in my stomach.

He scares me, a lot. His rashness, the bold attitude with which he directs his ship into anything and everything the enemy throws at him, his nonchalance in the face of death; these things chase away my sleep at night, even when I'm curled against him and can feel his steady breathing. Often I wonder if his entire reason for becoming a pilot was just to tempt death, simply a ploy to make it socially acceptable for him to try and commit suicide every day. So many times he's nearly succeeded in that effort, and I've spent twice as many of that number of dark hours staring towards the black ceiling, remembering every time I've almost lost him.

The Janus aspect of his character always catches me a little off guard. He's so brash, so confident in public, but when we're at home all he wants in the world is to lie quietly with me, his head in my lap as we stare at the television or talk about inanities. His bookshelves are full of philosophy, history-he has a passion for history, which surprised me greatly at first- and works in four different languages, all of which he can understand perfectly. Some days, though, he just can't put down the operating manual for the latest versions of his favorite weapons. I hear him describing how he topped his all-time kill record in the last battle to awed listeners at parties, and it makes me want to cry because they will never know that he is anything more than a well-tuned killing machine, just like the guns he loves so much. The rest of the world only sees one of his faces, and I, having the rare privilege of seeing both sides of him, can barely stand their naivety.

Even in bed, there is the dichotomy. Some nights he hides behind his wall, acting almost virginal as I push into him as gently as possible, his muffled moans sounding ashamed. Other times he can be so rough that I barely believe it's him in bed with me, his actions borderlining on rape, except that I like it so it probably doesn't count. Occasionally he is somewhere in between, and that's when I know he's been thinking about losing me, because his hands move so slowly and sweetly across my body that it's nearly torture and his whole form seems bent on pleasuring me until I beg him to stop being so kind, beg him to pound into me and end the suffering that his smooth, barely noticeable thrusts put me through, every moment leaving me writhing on the edge, desperately seeking more.

I wonder sometimes if I am the same way, sometimes shy and other times almost violent in my lovemaking, if I ever cause him real pain when I grip the feathers of his chest to feel the firmness beneath them, if he enjoys the pressure of my head resting just above his heart in the sweaty aftermath of our passion. He never says anything during sex, even when I ask him direct questions; once, as a test of how far he would let me go, I gripped him and squeezed as hard as I could, hoping he would say something. Instead he just lay there, staring at me, tears welling in his eyes at the pain I was causing, and let me do what I wanted to him. I felt so guilty afterwards that I ended up crying, sobbing my sorries against his shoulder before I proceeded to lick and suck my way up and down his body in apology.

He didn't complain that night, told me not to worry, that it didn't really hurt that bad, the same thing he always says. 'It didn't really hurt.' I know better. Every time I have to walk into a hospital room to find him, every time I patch injuries gotten who-knows-where, he grins, looks me in the face, and tells me it didn't really hurt. Sure, Falco. Sure. Arterial bleeding doesn't really hurt, and neither do crushed bones or being thrown into metal walls by giant machines. Right, sweetheart. Right.

The thing is, it calms me when he says that, because I know that it means he hasn't given up, that he'll be okay. I have nightmares about one day running my fingers through broken and bloodied feathers and having him look up at me, wordless, unable to say it because it's not true anymore. Not able to say it because it does hurt, and it's bad enough that he can't lie to me. Not able to say it because he knows he's going to die, and that I'm going to have to watch it happen.

He has plenty of nightmares where I'm the one on the floor, bleeding out; I know that even though he never tells me. If he's willing to talk about a dream, if I can coax it out of him, it's always about his childhood; if it's about me, he won't breathe a word of it. He slips into my room to be sure it wasn't real, but he won't talk. I can always tell how bad it was by how quiet he is, though, and by how long he lies next to me silently, staring up at the ceiling, squeezing me tighter from time to time as a shudder of memory runs through him. I both love and hate those nights. I love them because he's next to me and my arms can lock themselves around him, and I hate them because I know the dreams hurt him, especially the ones about his childhood. About his bastard of a father, his addict mother, the gangs. When I see that look that means he's thinking about them, about before he met me, I want to go into the slums and hunt down every person who ever hurt him. I want to make them pay.

I wish the world would realize that he seems the way he seems because he wears his shields, the defenses developed practically before he could walk, so effectively. Beneath those shields is the Falco I know, the man who holds me so tenderly at night, who comforts me with his very existence. The man who kills enemy soldiers in dozens but would sooner kill himself than strike a child. The man whose public life is modeled on Sun-Tzu and Machiavelli but spends his evenings reading Plato and poetry.

I don't know if anyone will believe what I've written here, if it's ever found and read, but I hope they do. Call me vindictive, but when the powers that be find out how wrongfully they've maligned him over the years, I hope they have trouble looking in mirrors. I hope they commit hara-kiri out of sheer guilt. I hope they take a good, long time to think about what they've done, and really feel the shame they ought to for it.

I hope like hell someone believes me.


End file.
